shiukopuppy's Blog
shiukopuppy's posts about: viola
Oct 2, 2007 | 6:25 PM PST
Tags: cottage garden , snapdragon , viola , faerie garden
Well, still struggling along with the cottage garden. I've been weeding the native garden because somehow in the last couple of weeks, it has been overgrown by long grasses. It's nice to know it's warm enough for them to grow. We've decided not to let it happen again by mulching, and this will also mean less watering.
Here are some of the 'cottage' flowers that are blooming: snapdragons, and a viola. I love snapdragons, I played with them a lot during childhood. I never thought of them as dragons; to me they looked like goats. Wouldn't it be nice to plant a faerie garden? I'll try to find out which plants the faeries like. :)
Oct 1, 2007 | 3:28 AM PST
Tags: cottage garden , snapdragon , viola , peas , snowpeas
Well, today I did lots of work in the garden that didn't seem to amount to much! I started by casting some lawn seed on a tiny patch of earth that I had prepared. The lawn will only be a few square feet as we have had drought here for many years. The soil was full of worms, so hopefully the lawn will survive. I mixed in soil wetting granules and organic lawn feed pellets. Then I covered the seed with straw, which my partner and I have noticed that the council does when they sow lawns.
After that, I checked on my peas & snowpeas and pinched out the extra shoots. There are lots of little pea pods and flowers which was exciting. But there was a much more pressing task - a clover outbreak in the front yard. The clover in the front yard had grown halfway through the onions bed and had started growing those prickly little burrs on them (I think they are called bindi?) My partner and I tore them out for a while. This bed used to be a circular flowerbed. I had planted snapdragons earlier in the year but we must have torn some of them out. I moved some violas from another bed to fill in the spaces.
I have to say - I HATE English cottage gardens... but I'm renting a 1920s cottage, and as the last year has gone by, I've been finding that English style edgings and borders do suit this place, and I've been buying little flowers and lavenders etc and letting that style influence me. It's terrible, isn't it! ;)
